“I don’t deny that the life here has been a revelation to me.  I’m not talkin’ about creeds (for I don’t know much about them, and I don’t think it’s in me to care much); but so far as the work here is concerned—­” He paused.

“We can take little credit for that; it is the outcome of our Order.”

The Boy failed to catch the effect of the capital letter.

“Yes, it’s just that—­the order, the good government!  A fella would be a bigot if he couldn’t see that the system is as nearly perfect as a human institution can be.”

“That has been said before of the Society of Jesus.”  But he spoke with the wise man’s tolerance for the discoveries of the young.  Still, it was not to discuss the merits of his Order that he had got up an hour before his time.  “I understand, maybe better than yourself, something of the restlessness that drove you here.”

“You understand?”

The priest nodded.

“You had the excuse of the old plantation and the sister—­”

The Boy sat up suddenly, a little annoyed.

The priest kept on:  “But you felt a great longing to make a breach in the high walls that shut you in.  You wanted to fare away on some voyage of discovery.  Wasn’t that it?”.  He paused now in his turn, but the Boy looked straight before him, saying nothing.  The priest leaned forward with a deeper gravity.

“It will be a fortunate expedition, this, my son, if thou discover thyself—­and in time!” Still the Boy said nothing.  The other resumed more lightly:  “In America we combine our travels with business.  But it is no new idea in the world that a young man should have his Wanderjahr before he finds what he wants, or even finds acquiescence.  It did not need Wilhelm Meister to set the feet of youth on that trail; it did not need the Crusades.  It’s as old as the idea of a Golden Fleece or a Promised Land.  It was the first man’s first inkling of heaven.”

The Boy pricked his ears.  Wasn’t this heresy?

“The old idea of the strenuous, to leave home and comfort and security, and go out to search for wisdom, or holiness, or happiness—­whether it is gold or the San Grael, the instinct of Search is deep planted in the race.  It is this that the handful of men who live in what they call ’the world’—­it is this they forget.  Every hour in the greater world outside, someone, somewhere, is starting out upon this journey.  He may go only as far as Germany to study philosophy, or to the nearest mountain-top, and find there the thing he seeks; or he may go to the ends of the earth, and still not find it.  He may travel in a Hindu gown or a Mongolian tunic, or he comes, like Father Brachet, out of his vineyards in ‘the pleasant land of France,’ or, like you, out of a country where all problems are to be solved by machinery.  But my point is, they come!  When all the other armies of the world are disbanded, that army, my son, will be still upon the march.”